IIT Delhi Winter Admission Experience

Hello Guys!!

I applied for winter admission to IIT Delhi in December 2020.

Step 1

I got shortlisted for programming test. There were 5 questions which I had to solve in a time span of 3 hours. I was able to solve 2 out of 5 completely and got selected for next round of interview

Step 2

I was asked to fill a google form with the choice of area in which I want to apply for MS, the names of faculty under which I will be interested in working and their two recent research papers that interests me.

Step 3

My interview was on MS TEAMS and there were around 10 profs in the panel. Some were silent and just observing and 4-5 out of them asked me questions.

First question was the introduction.

Then from the google form that I filled they checked my interest and asked me in what fields I am interested in. I replied with NLP and IR. Then they stated asking me questions from NLP but I just started with NLP and had no answers to their questions. Then they asked me if I had prepared anything for the interview :P. I replied with Information Retrieval.

They then asked me few questions from IR like Precision, Recall, F-score, TF-IDF, etc. I studied IR at IIT Hyderabad and thus also did one course project in IR. I explained them my project on which I was working at that time. Then they started with the questions from DS Algo. They asked me to solve the famous 3 sum problem. I got nervous and could explain till the part of 2 sum only (which I did as part of my ADSA assignment again @IITH) and could not connect that to 3 sum at that time.

I took this interview very lightly as I was already doing MTech from IIT Hyd. and was not at all prepared. Just with the knowledge from my then subjects that I was studying as part of my coursework at Hyd I answered all the questions.

Anyway, I got emails from two professors who wanted to have one more round of interview. I prepared for this one and I again got questions from basic math (Differentiation), Data structures and Information Retrieval. I was able to answer most of them this time.

Result

Got Selected!!!
And I am now doing MS in Information Retrieval.

PS: As there were very few experiences from people taking winter admission, so I thought of sharing mine. I also appeared for same interview in June 2020, but could not crack it that time. One of the prof taking my interview remembered me from my last interview as I applied under same research area and with those same professors only. I will keep updating my site with more blogs if I find something new about winter admits in terms of timeline for events like internship and placements.